Gajah Gallery is proud to present In Sensible Spaces, featuring emerging artists Dini Nur Aghnia (Indonesia), Mahalakshmi Kannappan (Singapore), and Kara Inez (Malaysia).
Their explorations of content, context, and contruction are arranged and rearranged within the space to foster discourse and a closer immersion of art between these regional artists. Individually, the artists have their own stance, skills, and strengths, but together this exhibitionary participation asks – how do these artists draw from their environments to fill a temporary space?
Visceral constructs are highlighted in all three artists’ practices, yet these come from a space that engages and expands their horizons to seek what is next. Gajah Gallery invites viewers to witness the conversation that these artists engage in through their work in a space that fills one’s senses.
Dini Nur Aghnia (Indonesia) is an emerging artist currently studying at the Institut Seni Indonesia in Yogyakarta. Using biorganic materials, she forms textured landscapes sculpted from discs of corn flour and clay. Her works capture the often-overlooked landscapes around her in brilliant colours, highlighting, for example, the sunrise and sunset that we may take for granted. In this everyday solar phenomenon, the artist finds rebirth, joy, life and victory, themes that manifest in her compelling works.
Dini has exhibited both locally and regionally in Yogyakarta, Solo, Gresik, Surabaya, Singapore, and Malaysia.
Kara Inez’s (Malaysia) practice challenges the boundaries that limit conversations surrounding the female body to private spheres. Using silicone and abject materials such as hair and skin, she re-inhabits the social sphere with these absent bodies of women. For this exhibition, the artist draws from the raw materiality of flesh, creating innocuously grotesque sculptures as a means to touch on her relationship with her own female body.
Since graduating with a BA (Hons) in Fine Arts from LASALLE College of the Arts, Inez has been awarded The Winston Oh Travel Award 2019, where she ventured to South India to carry out research on the hair trade.
Mahalakshmi Kannappan (Singapore) is an emerging Singapore-based artist who recently graduated from Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts. As a diasporic individual, she often finds herself caught between two very different cultures with distinct beliefs and mindsets. The decisions as to what to adopt and why, are an ongoing struggle she addresses and gives form to through her work.
For many of her works, the material takes center stage to discuss and expand on the idea of change. Her practice seeks to identify, amalgamate, and distort different materials as part of a continuous inquiry into their properties. In her words, these are reflections of “how these changes are accepted and accumulated.” She looks into the process of laying material,
specifically charcoal, as experimentations on what can and cannot be controlled. The unpredictable responses of the material add to the inexplicable nature of change.
